Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ... - S3 Tech Training

Chapter 8: Being Normal: Normalization and Other Basic Design Issues
Editing Table Properties and Objects That Belong to the Table
Beyond the basic attributes that we’ve looked at thus far, we can also edit many other facets of our table.
How to get at these to edit or add to them happens in two different ways:
❑ Properties: These are edited in a window that pops up and docks, by default, on the right-hand
side of the Management Studio inside the diagramming window. To bring up the properties
window, click the Properties Window icon on the toolbar in the Management Studio.
❑ Objects that belong to the table, such as Indexes, Constraints, and Relationships: These are
edited in their own dialog, which you can access by right-clicking on the table in the diagram
and choosing the item that you want to set.
These are important facets of our diagram-based editing, so let’s look at some of the major players.
Properties Window
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Making things like column order changes happens to be one area where the built-in
tools positively excel. I’ve used a couple of other ERD tools, and they all offered the
promise of synchronizing a change in column order between the database and the
diagram — the success has been pretty hit and miss. (In other words, be very careful
about doing it around live data.)
Also, under the heading of one more thing — use the scripting option rather than the
live connection to the database to make changes like this if you’re operating against live
data. That way you can fully test the script against test databases before risking your
real data. Be sure to also fully back up your database before making this kind of change.
Figure 8-14 shows the Properties window for our CustomerNotes table.
Figure 8-14
You can use this properties window to set several key table properties — most notably what schema the
table belongs to as well as whether the table has an Identity column.